Grace Zaring Stone, a Novelist Under Two Names, Dies at 100

By ELEANOR BLAU

Published: October 1, 1991

Grace Zaring Stone, a novelist who also wrote under the pen name Ethel Vance, died on Sunday at the Mary Elizabeth Nursing Center in Mystic, Conn. She was 100 years old and had lived in Stonington, Conn.

Three of Mrs. Stone's novels were made into films: "The Bitter Tea of General Yen," in 1933, which starred Barbara Stanwyck and Nils Asther; "Escape" (1940,) with Norma Shearer, Robert Taylor and Conrad Veidt, and "Winter Meeting" (1948,) with Bette Davis.

"The Bitter Tea of General Yen," about a New England woman who arrives in China to marry a missionary but becomes a captive of a Chinese warlord, was the first movie to be shown at Radio City Music Hall.

"Escape," an anti-Nazi thriller, was written in 1939 under the pseudonym Ethel Vance. In 1942 the author said the pen name had been used to protect her daughter, Eleanor Perenyi, who was living in occupied Europe, and because Mrs. Stone's husband, Ellis, was the United States naval attache in Paris, where they were living.

The book became a best seller, and Mrs. Stone used the Vance name for some of her later books, including "Reprisal" (1942) and "Winter Meeting," (1946).

Mrs. Stone was the great-great-granddaughter of Robert Owen, the British social reformer and socialist who founded the cooperative colony of New Harmony in Indiana. Her mother died when she was born, and she spent most of her childhood "visiting around," she said.

"In all the houses of the Owen descendants there were many books being very thoroughly read and almost everyone kept diaries," she said. "Diary keeping, writing in general, was just something one did. Then I married into the Navy and of course that was very, very different. But when my husband was stationed at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, the place seemed to get me started."

She wrote an account of a hurricane, and the Atlantic Monthly bought it, and later bought a short story as well. Then "Bobbs-Merrill wrote to ask me if I had a novel in mind, by any chance," Mrs. Stone said, "and of course that was a most amazing question to me, because I'd had a novel in mind practically forever."

Mrs. Stone's first novel was "The Heaven and Earth of Dona Elena," published in 1929. Her other works included "The Cold Journey" (1934,) "The Secret Thread" (1949) and "Althea" (1962).

Surviving besides her daughter, a writer, of Stonington, are a grandson and a great-graddaughter.